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Homemaking

November 07, 2017

Well, some of the pork came back from the butcher last night, and Martin and I spent a frantic two hours getting everything portioned up. On the table above is one of five x 5kg bags of sausages, which adds to the existing 25kg in the freezer, making 50kg. Then there were five x 5kg bags of mince, which the cats nearly killed us for. Georgie is not keen on raw mince and often walks away from a plate but he woofed this stuff back in double quick time.

Next week I have 45kg of back and streaky bacon coming. I'm quite interested to see how fully formed the bacon slices are. The last pig had the 'head' of the bacon but not the tail. Then in December there will be around 30-40kg of gammon, just in time for Christmas. And in the New Year I will be rendering all of the fat for lard, purifying it and using it to make soap.

I popped into town with MIL today and came back with six new books to add to the collection. I was quite excited to find the Jewish cooking one, as I have wanted to cook an authentic Jewish chicken soup with dumplings for years (by the way, I am aware of the irony of having a post about pork and Jewish cooking!). I've been turfing out some books over the last couple of weeks, but I just seem to bring in so many interesting ones to replace them!

I had decided to see if I could sell off some of them, as well as some clutter, to put towards Christmas. I changed my mind about selling my unwanted books on eBay, as I realised the fees for it and PayPal are ridiculous and the sold prices are tiny. Instead I sent one box of 10 off to Ziffit, and managed to get £15.70 back. I'm due to drop another box tomorow and see if I can get the £17.50-ish I was quoted. I still have another two sets of 10 to go for similar money plus a big fruit tray of books that are not being accepted yet to check back on periodically. If they are still here next spring I will take them to a car boot sale.

Speaking of which, I forgot to mention we did a car boot sale a month ago and made about £140. I also sold a pair of curtains that used to be in the back room of the old house and managed to clear about £19 for them. I have a couple of pairs of curtains I bought at a car boot sale plus various single curtains I bought for fabric, so those will be going on ebay too plus there is a big box of vintage linens I might have a go at selling as well - I won't sell them individually, just let them go as a job lot. There is a lot more stuff to try and get rid of, plus a further car load for another car boot sale, but that will now not be until the Spring.

So lots of activity here in preparation for the silly season ahead and a slightly less cluttered New Year hopefully.

March 05, 2017

I've to'd and fro'd over getting a pressure cooker for a long time. They can do wonders with cheap cuts of meat and often cook things cheaper and faster than ordinary cooking could.

However, I have natural fear of things exploding in my face. I remember my mother's pressure cooker rocking away on the stove when I was growing up, and I hated the thing. Wouldn't go near it. She's be standing there working out how many pounds of pressure to apply to whatever was going to be cooked and fiddling with the valve. Urg. Run away. Now of course technology has moved on. All of the pressures and times are already programmed in, and it's as simple as add the ingredients, choose the programme, hit start and walk away. And they can bring down your electric bill as well, as they are cheaper than using gas and electric to cook with.

At the moment, we have an Neff touch control ceramic hob to cook with, which can use up to 2.2kW per burner per hour (with the oven at 4.8kW), and is pushing our bills up massively. Finally after seeing yet another £60+ monthly electric bill come in on Friday and knowing I had wiggle room in the budget as I had no council tax to pay this month, I steeled myself and bought one, a multi-function six litre 20-in-1 model. I figured if I was going to get one I might as well spent the extra on the additional functions and see just how much of the daily cooking I can do with it.

Cooks from frozen – cook a whole chicken straight from the freezer in just 60 minutes

That really settled it for me, especially cooking joints from frozen. Also, I have a lot of meat in the freezer which I often bypass because it will take too long to cook, such as stewing beef. I have to remember to get it in the slow cooker in the morning to have a decent meal ready by the evening, and I've been so busy I often just don't manage to do that.

I managed to do a beef in red wine stew last night in 30 minutes flat, and then this morning I made bacon and eggs using the fry function. I have lentil soup for my lunches this week, which is currently cooking (in 20 minutes!) and then I'm going to cook up a whole load of potatoes for mash to portion for the freezer, which should take 15 minutes as well. Later on, I'm going for a hunt in the freezer for a frozen chicken I know is in there and that will do for our dinner tonight. Then tomorrow the chicken bones and a large beef rib marrow bone are going in there to make stock. Normally it takes me a good 24 hours in a slow cooker to make really good gelatinous stock, so I'm hoping to get an equivalent stock in under an hour.

But what of my money-saving halogen oven? I still have that, but it is sitting very forlorn in a box in the corner of the kitchen. Andrew James replaced the lid of it free of charge within it's warranty period, as the metal inside had gone rusty. I changed its bulb last year and used it for a very short period of time before the bulb went again. I haven't done anything with it since we moved. While the bulbs are relatively cheap at about £7, it took two of us to change it and it was a hair-raising experience that involved brute force at one point and electrical tape. We both looked at each other afterwards as if to say "should it really have been that hair-raising? If so, maybe a consumer shouldn't be doing it?" I'm also not sure if our fumbling was the reason the bulb went so shortly afterwards.

Now, the halogen oven is a 1300w product and can cook things 30-40% quicker than a normal fan oven, hence it being money-saving, so by my calculation using the 1000w digital pressure cooker should save even more money. I can also steam veg and pasta in the pressure cooker, which you can't really do using a halogen cooker, and supposedly bake and make jam. I will be testing that last one shortly, as I have two tins of Mamade in the cupboard to make marmalade with. However, one disadvantage is that I can't cook anything dry, like roast potatoes, chips/wedges or garlic bread so I will order another halogen oven bulb and see if by combining it with the digital pressure cooker I can bring down the electric bill.

I shall report back at the end of March, although I won't be able to get a full picture until the middle of April, as our electric billing period runs from the middle of the month.

May 19, 2016

I had to take a break as the process of moving out of our house and into my mother-in-law's was fairly fraught and punctuated by illness, injury and just plain old-fashioned exhaustion.

We moved in on 4th May, and to be honest I'm only just now feeling better about everything. I don't miss the house at all. For the first time in 10 years I'm sleeping right through the night without waking and feel 'unburdened'. I had no idea how much that house affected my health.

The chickens, however, were in uproar at being taken from a large pen and garden to a small pen and patch of grass, and started eating their own eggs and screaming in frustration, but now they have settled a little more. They found all the cosy little corners of the garden to hang out in, and are 'allowing' us to have one egg a day. Fleagle doesn't care a jot. She sleeps on the windowsill in the sun and eats her food and seems quite content. Georgie, however, is not a happy camper, having been taken away from his beloved hunting fields to sit in a house looking out of the window, but it is for his own protection. The house is on a main road and he will be squished like countless cats before him have been on that road. He will remain a house cat until we move up to Lincolnshire.

Talking of Lincolnshire, we've found somewhere to buy. I genuinely thought we were never going to find something.

Originally, we had decided on three criteria: to find somewhere that we could all live in happily together but separately, that had enough storage for Martin's cars, and some land for me to raise a couple of sheep and pigs for the freezer. Crucially, Martin's mother would be putting money into the house and that meant we would go without a mortgage. We would be mortgage free.

Only one problem. We could not find anything in that price bracket that met all of our requirements. For two of us yes but not three. We've been looking for a couple of years on and off and hadn't seen anything, and after 12 weeks of scouring all of the East Anglia, Suffolk, Norfolk, Leicestershire, Northamptonshire, Nottinghamshire, Cambridgeshire and Lincolnshire every single day and not seeing anything, we were pretty sure that the property did not exist. The problem was to compromise on two of the three criteria meant that one of us wouldn't be getting what we wanted.

We decided that we had to go out and view some of the properties that fulfilled two of the three criteria, reasoning that in the flesh the houses might show how they could be adapted in time to meet all three. But it was no good, nothing grabbed us at all. Nothing worked or could be adapted. Most of them were better looking in the photos than in real life and we left viewings deflated at the unworkable dirt, mess and flooding expertly 'hidden' by estate agent's photos.

Then by chance, when we giving some feedback on a viewing to one agent, she mentioned there was something that might suit but it was a lot above our budget. It had been on the market for over a year and the owners were not too keen to sell for some reason. What the hell, pop it over, I said.

OMG. There it was. Yes, we'd have to have a mortgage, but there it was. We viewed the next evening, and it clicked immediately. It felt like coming home. Enough room for all of us to live without getting under each other's feet, a set of dry barns for Martin to do his cars and a half acre paddock with fruit trees for me to serve as grazing ground.

Buoyed up, I scoured the property ads for other houses in this new price bracket, we even viewed a few, but again nothing was suitable. It seems we found the only house that we could have found for us. We did the 'offer' dance back and forth with the owners for a few days and finally they accepted us. They were not reticent to sell, they had just had a lot of unsuitable offers and people wanting the barns to develop and not the house. They wanted someone to respect the entire property and use it as a family home.

So, at the moment we are doing the searches and the survey has been done, and hopefully in the next six weeks or so we will complete.

April 29, 2015

The gold standard of saving for me would be 50% of our income, every month, because that would build up a life-changing amount of cash very quickly. To do that though I would have to go full-time and work a freelance job every week, which I have been fighting against due to hating the feeling of living for the weekend and being a zombie. As I do the majority of the cooking and housework, the alarm going off at 5:15am five days a week hurts and leaves me so tired in the evenings I get nothing but dinner successfully accomplished (and sometimes not even then and resort to takeaways) and my weekends are taken up by housework.

I felt very unhappy in my last job when I did very early starts five days a week and freelance income at the same time, but I just didn’t have the strength to make a major change. Anyway, it's a moot point because my current workplace doesn’t have enough work for me to go full-time, although they would love me to. The first two weeks of the month is quite bereft of work so unless they increase their sales a lot or my editing colleague leaves the company, full-time hours for now is out of the question.

So, to start with I’ve decided to focus on getting our normal savings rate up to 25% by making a few tweaks to my budget. I’ve earmarked a few places in our budget where these tweaks can happen.

Broadband and phone – we are in an expensive area where only BT wholesale manage our broadband, so we are stuck paying around £22 a month, but we do not get unlimited broadband and are now going over our limit and incurring charges each month. We also have our phone with TalkTalk, and this is getting pretty expensive too. I worked out at the weekend that if we shifted everything to Plusnet we could get unlimited broadband and phone for £17.50 a month + phone line rental + call charges. A conservative estimate puts the savings at around £28 a month!! I haven’t been paying attention to what’s going on out in the marketplace at all, so I feel pretty daft I didn’t spot how much we could save before. I think this earns the well-deserved title of Frugal Failure of the Month!

Gas – I seem to have gone back to using the gas range to cook on. I don’t know when I stopped using the halogen oven, but it saved me around 25% of our annual gas bill when I was using it. Last weekend I dusted it off and started using it again.

House and garden – this always seems to have, consistently, in excess of £100 every month spent, some months it creeps towards £200. I need to find out what is going on, so for the next month I am going to record everything going into this category. I know we spent a lot last month, but March and April are always a bit expensive due to improving the garden before the start of the growing season.

Books/DVDs – some months this gets as high as £40 which, bearing in mind I tend to buy secondhand not new, adds up to a lot of stuff! I’ve decided not to buy any more DVDs or books, certainly none of the latter until I have read everything outstanding. There are dozens of them waiting to be read.

Food shopping (eating in, eating out, takeaways) – we’re pretty good with the last two, only spending about £20 on a takeaway once a month and around £30-£50 eating out (which includes restaurant meals, afternoon teas or snacks when out at events). However, I know that without keeping an eye on it, it can go as high as £300. From now on, I don’t want to go above £200 a month, preferably £175. We’ve also stopped shopping at Aldi, mostly because we seem to be passing by Tesco a lot and keep nipping in rather than drive five miles to Aldi. However, the costs are mounting up, and given that the Aldi savings outweigh the petrol, we could actually change our route home slightly and go past there instead of Tesco one evening.

Insurance – I haven’t updated our building and contents insurance for years, and need to have a look at both of them and what they are offering. I have a feeling we are paying for an awful lot less than we have in the past, so I need to get some quotes in. Mind you, I might not be able to make a change before the renewal date, which I think is in December.

More scratch cooking for lunches - for a few months I fell back into bad habits and started buying Martin's lunches. There would often be supermarket deals on meat slices or Cornish pasties, and while I was there I might get some ready made cake to go with it and some pre-packaged 'nibbles' for him to munch on while walking round. While it doesn't seem like a lot, over the course of the month it was adding up to about £60, which for obvious reasons is a big chunk of our food budget. For the last two weeks I have replaced his shop bought pasties and slices with my own and gone back to making a large cake every week. These two aspects of his lunch now cost around £3.50 for the week - a saving of around £6.50. As for me, I just take leftovers from dinner, or something quick like cheesy vegetables or egg mayonnaise salad (if I have salad greens in the garden) plus plenty of fruit and raw chopped veggies.

Cheaper takeaway options - Martin loves Domino's pizza, and we usually have one a month on a buy-one-get-one-free deal so I can have a gluten-free one for myself. However, at £18.29 it is quite expensive. We've tried other supermarket types, and found one Aldi pizza for £2.00 that he thinks is almost as good. Unfortunately, that pizza is a limited edition and only comes in once in a blue moon. I can stash a few, but they take up a lot of freezer space and eventually we end up back at Dominos after a few weeks. We tried a pizza from Sainsbury's last week, which was freshly handmade at its pizza counter and cost £3.75 for a 14 inch pizza. Martin seemed to really like that, so if we do that once a month that will really help bring down the cost. As for me, the shops are unsurprisingly bereft of gluten-free pizza so I'm going to experiment with making gluten-free pizza bases so I can make my own.

I think tweaking all of these areas a bit more in the ways I outlined above will help us find another £100-£200 a month in the budget.

I just have to work on getting my income up beyond the odd set of extra hours and sporadic freelance job, and which preferably does not leave me feeling like a zombie.

February 24, 2015

I saw this theme about frugal wins and fails while on my surfing travels recently, but cannot remember where I saw it to credit the right blogger so I apologise in advance to them for snitching it.

It struck a chord with me because often bloggers end up being perceived as very different people to who we actually are, most of the time due to very rarely showing the bad bits, the failures. It's a conscious thing for me, because I only like reading about successes so I can find solutions and ideas to problem I have, so I often make the incorrect assumption that so will others. That's a shame because those failures can actually help others, sometimes more than the successes.

Anyway, I thought I'd share a few of my wins and failures from last week.

Frugal wins

Recycled the last bits of the bones from a shoulder of lamb into a hearty soup and added the last of 2014's potatoes from my store (picture above)

Using up the last of the Christmas olives as a paste for the lamb shoulder mentioned above (olives in oil can last 2-3 months in the fridge before you scream food poisoning!)

Sitting under my birthday present from Martin - a heated throw - each evening at a cost of 1p for three hours, rather than turn up the heating or turn on the room heater.

Darning an elbow hole in an outdoor cardigan rather than throw it out.

Bagging a big stash of newspapers from work for the garden, but went through and clipped out all the puzzle pages before using them so now I have a crossword and sodoku to do whenever I feel like it.

Frugal fails

Bought four 'yellow sticker' dinners at Waitrose last week - each pack had two bacon stuffed chicken breasts with a cheese and breadcrumbed crispy topping - only to realise that Martin won't eat the cheese and I'm gluten-free at the moment (testing a theory I'll tell you about another day). I had to scrape it all off, wash them thoroughly and then cook them with some sweet chilli sauce. What waste to arrive at plain chicken breasts!

Left a wet gloss paintbrush out by accident overnight instead of wrapping it up in clingfilm to use again the next day, so I had to throw it out and use a new one.

So there it is. I muck up all the time, but I win more than I lose so I manage to just nose ahead every week!

October 17, 2014

I'll admit it, I'm pretty cheap when it comes to my beauty regime. Years ago I spent a fortune on having my hair cut and coloured, legs waxed, facials, nails, pedicures etc. Now I barely even notice one of these shops as I walk by. I'd spend hours looking at hair, face and make-up products in Boots, Body Shop and department stores, being suckered in by glossy packaging and promises of beauty. Now I barely glance in their direction.

A some point in the past I realised that I was wasting my money, and I didn't have that much to waste.

Now my beauty routine looks a little different.

Cleansing/toning - something oil-based and witchhazel. I have been known to use anything oil-based, including olive oil, jojoba oil or coconut oil if I have some in the cupboard, but at the moment it's moisturiser. My toner is good old fashioned witch hazel from the local chemist. If I have eye make-up on, I use baby oil to remove it.

In the shower, I wash using a liquid soap I made myself from a bar of organic glycerine-based soap. It is so much better than anything else I've ever used. All soaps have glycerine in them when they are at liquid stage, as it is produced as a natural part of the soap-making process. However, it is removed and cheaper synthetic more skin-drying ingredients are substituted. Glycerine can be sold on by the soap companies for a lot of money. Meanwhile, we get dumped with dry skin that needs moisturising.

Talking of moisturising - if I need it for my face and neck I use Aldi's Q10 moisturiser from its Lacura range. A £1.99 pot lasts me about three months. I bought a caffiene roll-on eye pen to help me reduce my morning eye puffiness. Cold water, ice or cold teaspoons are a rotten thing at 5am. I have tried. The roll-on is gentler.

For my body, I usually use baby oil in the shower and in between if I need it I use plain old aqueous cream. This tub was about £3.50 and it will last me all year. I use all sorts of gifted and car boot snuffled hand creams for my hands by each sink and in my handbag so I don't have to take a tub like this out with me or decant it.

Exfoliating - for my face, neck and chest bicarbonate of soda using plain water as a base. For everything else, a loofah mitt in the shower.

Shaving and deodorising - shops own brand deodorant (70p) and baby oil as a shaving oil with a standard Aldi brand razor. For years I tried different ways of getting rid of my fur, all of which made my skin react. This included sugaring and waxing (in a salon and at home), an epilator, depilatory creams and shaving gels. Then one day I read about shaving oil and thought maybe baby oil would be a good substitute, and I've never looked back. Occasionally I mix the baby oil with moisturiser (or sometimes hair conditioner) if my legs are feeling sensitive at certain times of the month. I always use Johnson's baby oil as my legs react oddly to own brands. No idea why.

Bubble bath - i think these are a waste of money now, despite using them a lot in the past. They are just there to smell nice and produce bubbles, which I don't care about. If I use anything in a bath, it's usually after a hard day and it will always be bath salts. I feel noticeably better after a bath with these if my muscles feel achey and sore. I also use them as a foot soak.

Teeth - always use shops own toothpaste (45p) and a medium soft generic toothbrush (£1). I have bought branded toothpastes in the past when they're on offer, but either hated the taste or could see no difference in their mode of action, so now they sit in my grocery stash unused (i must get around to passing them on). It is the brushing action not the toothpaste that does the job according to my dental hygienist. I floss every day now (generic floss!) and have just had a hygienist thoroughly descale my teeth. I don't use mouthwash as I think it is a con set up and perpetuated by marketeers to make consumers think they'll have bad breath if they don't fish out the last few bacteria from their mouth recesses. Very few people have proper halitosis. The rest are just paranoid because of efficient marketing campaigns.

Hair - this is a biggie for me. I have long hair. I don't bother with fancy shampoo or conditioner anymore because I can't justify the prices and the lack of results they give me. I tend to stock up on the big 900ml bottles of Tresemme when they are in a BOGOF offer. I'll buy 3-5 each of shampoo and conditioner at a time. The one product I find hard to do without is Aussie dual personality frizz and conditioning milk. It give my hair some weight, stops it being so flyaway and controls most of the frizz. I buy it on a BOGOF when it goes on offer and stock up for many months. I have tried most of the other products on the market over the years, including Frizz Ease, hot oils, deep conditioners and all the other fancy hairdresser branded products, and none of them do anything good for me. The best thing for my hair is to not style it with heated tongs etc or use a lot of products or mess around too much with it. I tend to keep it up in a ponytail or bun or swept back in a clip.

To colour in the greys and improve its condition, I use henna. I stopped using normal hair dye due to the chemicals and the possibility of reactions. I did use Normal henna for a while, but it was permanent, faded to give me brassy tones and was a long-winded and mucky process to use. I also didn't want to be someone who kept having to dye in that grey line down my hairline, so I stopped using it. I now use a semi-permanent henna brand called Suyra once a month, which is liquid and easy to apply quickly. After 90 minutes it's done and I can rinse it out. It fades over 20 washes or so, so I don't have to deal with a grey hairline problem.

***

So that's pretty much me.

Martin is a lot simpler than me.

He nicks my shampoo.

He nicks my bath salts.

He nicks my aqueous cream when his hands start cracking in the winter.

September 16, 2014

I faithfully promised some online forum friends that I would not buy reduced food this month. My freezer is packed to the gills, my cupboards bursting at the seams, so I set myself the challenge that I would not spent more than £175 on food this month (normally £200) and the difference would go into the Christmas fund.

I've done really well so far, and only spent £75. Feeling smug.

Unfortunately, I popped into Tesco tonight to get some cat crunchies and milk. I was fighting with myself about going to the reduced sections, trying to stop myself, then giving in and making all sorts of bargains with myself about how small the size of the reductions would have to be to tempt me e.g 50% or less.

And they were :)

Hovis bread 49p reduced from £1, straight to the freezer

Warburton burger buns 49p reduced from £1, straight to the freezer

Cheerios (some serious puppy looks from Martin as he knows I don't really like prepped cereals) 60p from £2, very battered box

September 06, 2014

I went into work on Monday, only to find that there was enough work for me for the day, but not for Tuesday or Wednesday. Unfortunately that sometimes happens when you work for a business that has end of month filing deadlines. However, the beauty of being part time is that, unlike my full time counterparts, I can switch my working days around and slot them into a week later on in the month when I know it is going to be busy.

So, I've been here since Tuesday doing DIY and winter prepping. The former, as ever, involves stripping and painting metal doorframes, a task so dull I've come to hate it. BUT as of this week I only have one doorframe left to do in the house, and I have already part stripped and cleaned that last Christmas before wallpapering the lobby.

However, it has not been the easiest of tasks with Fleagle around. She sat in the bathroom watching me every day. Everytime I put on the paint stripper I had to carry her out of the room to make sure she didn't brush up against it. When I sat on the floor to get down to the last bits of the frame, she decided that the fabric of my skirt was an ideal resting spot.

Was there ever a cat that was so cute but oh so very annoying...it's like having a toddler.

Anyway, winter prepping has been going on since the Bank Holiday weekend. I walked round the house and garden, took stock of what needed to be done and have given myself a deadline of six weeks to complete it all. I'll post the list of jobs that I do each year this week - it might help some of you make plans to winter-proof your own homes before the bad weather hits.

This week I have managed to clean the conservatory roof, which was heaving with moss that had come off the main house roof. Talk about an ordeal. My arms are not long enough, even with a massive long mop, to reach the apex of the rood panels from below so I had to do a two-pronged attack from above and below. Irritatingly, there was part of one panel - a section of about 6" x 18" - I just could not get to no matter what ladder I used or angle I came at it from. I resorted to chucking hot soapy water at it from above to get the worst off, but you can still see if from below. In the end I pulled up the blind inside so you can't see it!

However, from the window I spotted another task that needed doing - de-mossing the back room roof.

If I don't, the first heavy downpour will see the moss block the gutter (worse that in is!), and the water will spill over and come in under the back door to flood the utility area. The garden grass rake is going to come in very handy for grabbing that lot.

This week I've also been clearing out all the manky corners of the house too, with the utility area coming under close scrutiny for cleaning. Over the spring and summer months it becomes a gardening dumping ground, so I had sorted it out, relocated a ton of stuff back to where it should be and given it all a good wipe down. It could do with a lick of white paint, but I can do that very quickly when I get to the last bits of the bathroom emulshioning. In fact, all the walls in that area could do with a quick going over with white paint, so when I have the small roller out I'll give it a once over.

I've unearthed a lot of winter textiles from their respective corners, and washed and dried those ready for winter.

All the radiators and grills have been scrubbed, defurred and dusted, so when the heating goes on I don't get a massive allergy attack as a year's worth of dust and cat fur flies up out of them into the atmosphere. The cats have a tendency to sit on the radiators to keep warm during the winter and can build up quite a pile of loose fur under the grills :)

The hobby room had turned into an awful dumping ground, so I cleared that out and tidied it properly. I managed to turf out two bags of rubbish, as well as four carrier bags for the charity shop and three to the tip shop. It's looking nice and clear in there now.

And what for the weekend? Rest? Relaxation? Car boot sale? Nope, not this weekend. While I have the energy I want to finish off some more jobs as work will now ramp up steadily towards the end of the month.

I have the conservatory to clean out, as that has also turned into a dumping ground, and a few small projects to finish off. There's the other bedside table left over from my February auction snuffles that needs a quick sand over and light coat of varnish. This is its mate, already done and in place.

The two prayer stands, also from my February snuffles (seen here in the auction hall), need cleaning and putting in place in the back bedroom.

Finally, I want to finish this pouffe. My father gave this to me a few months ago, but it had the most horrendous 1980s peach upholstery fabric and rusty castors. So I took it apart, threw out the castors, and put on some leftover upholstery fabric on it. I still have to put some edging in place to neaten up the fabric joins, screw the lid back on and then re-fit the castors, hopefully in the same holes. It shouldn't take more than a couple of hours to finish off.

August 25, 2014

A couple of quick trips out to a couple of supermarkets has yielded a few bargains this week to top up the food stores.

Three packs of trifle sponges 3 x 89p 39p - Martin has been making trifle noises lately. The closer we get to christmas, the louder the noises get.

Jar of decaff coffee £1.75 88p - because the label was loose!

480 teabags £5.50 £3.85 - because the corner of the box was crushed!

Three chocolate and orange large loaf cakes 3 x £2.99 99p - I very rarely buy basic cakes, but ones like this I tend to snap up as I can't make it cheaper by the time I buy the chocolate and oranges.

Four packs of 300g venison pieces 4 x £4.00 £2.86 - however, the supermarket had an offer of 3 for £10 on its meat products, so when the meat went through the till it went through with an additional £2.00 discount.

In addition, I found that our usual packs of fajita mixes, curry and chinese sauces were on offer for more than a 50% discount, so I've stocked up to see us through the next few months.

I'm off now to put on our early evening meal - venison stew - and brave the stinking rain to do some cleaning up in the garden.

As Martin was off out for the day, and I was at a loose end I went along to the local car boot sale this morning for a snuffle. Another good one. Tons of sellers and not many buyers, presumably all on holiday. That means only one thing - very low prices!

I managed to find a lot of stuff I had been looking for, and some things I was about to buy new, so I am very pleased.

New laptop bag £1 (had this exact one in my basket on Amazon for £15)

New union jack cushion 50p (for the study when the Blighty makeover is finished)

New London toiletries bag £1 (trying to find one to replace one where the lining had split)